Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Frozen plasticity


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   delete. Shereth 20:26, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

Frozen plasticity

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This "hypothesis" is highly theoretical (polite way of saying that it was proposed in a highly obscure journal full of biological crackpottery and no one knows about it). A lit search brings up nothing, and "frozen plasticity" gets a grand total of 82 real Google hits. (Far less than my own obscure personal name.) Completely non-notable and unknown to the scientific community. Reads like an article for someone shamelessly plugging their own forgotten hypothesis. Bueller 007 (talk) 08:31, 24 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Comment: I came here expecting an article on novel phases of materials, like some type of "liquid-metal" and was disappoiunted to find an evolution article as I would like to think many of these features could be replaced with equations and systems theory. In any case, these are the scirus hits, and there are a few that seem materials related but most seem to be to dictionaries or author's own work, but check for yourself as I can't form an opinion yet,
 * http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/search?q=%22frozen+plasticity%22+evolution&t=all&drill=yes&sort=1&p=0
 * Obscure, out of favor, or speculative alone shouldn't invalidate inclusion based on notability but obviously you'd like to see some peer recognition, even if out right rebuttal. Nerdseeksblonde (talk) 11:55, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions.  -- TexasAndroid (talk) 12:17, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Keep the given references are verifiable and reliable. The notion of highly obscure journal or unknown to the scientific community when formulated so, are nonsense when reliable and verifiable sources are referred Rirunmot (talk) 13:01, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment As a member of the scientific community relevant to this article, I can assure you that this "hypothesis" is absolutely unknown, as the Google image hits suggest. 82 Google hits does not merit inclusion in Wikipedia.  The references given (e.g. Flegr 1998) have been cited only twice in the literature since the "hypothesis" was introduced 11 years ago, once by the author himself.  Both of those citations were in the same journal as the original article ("Rivista di Biologia/Biology Forum"), which regularly publishes cook/beyond-the-fringe material that the rest of the scientific community has rejected (such as telepathy and creationism).  No one bothers to read that journal, because most scientists don't even know it exists.  (It has the lowest eigenfactor of any biology journal—by a very wide margin—and the second lowest Impact Factor after you remove self-citations.)  An idea should not be excluded from Wikipedia merely because it's pseudoscientific or because it was published in an obscure journal, and that's not what I'm arguing.  What I'm saying is, these are further evidence that no scientists know this hypothesis exists, and that this hypothesis is non-notable. Bueller 007 (talk) 16:26, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment : I would take issue with your comment regarding the sources cited in the article. For example, if the only known reference appears in Nature, that may seem highly regarded but yet it could appear as an advertisement or, more realistically, as a self-promotional opinion piece ( say it was a citation to the wall street journal but the page cited was opinion or blog). This requires a closer look. Obscure is fine but it needs consideration from peers, even if passing. Nerdseeksblonde (talk) 13:24, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
 * It is content that is verifiable, not sources. The concept of verifiability does not apply to sources.  It applies to the content that is based upon them.  Sources must be reliable, and part of that is being peer reviewed and published.  M. Flegr's own book is not the best of peer-reviewed sources for a scientific hypothesis.  For that, we need to look at articles published in academic journals.  As such M. Flegr's article in Rivista di Biologia, a peer-reviewed journal, is better in terms of reliability. Reliability of the sources supports our requirement that content be properly verifiable from good sources.  There is still a slight hurdle of the point that this might be a novel hypothesis that has simply failed to far to gain any traction in the world at large outside of its author, our No original research requirement.  As was not properly clear from the original article, but as Nerdseeksblonde points out above, all of the sources are M. Flegr xyrself, and it's difficult to find sources by other people where Flegr's ideas are acknowledged.  However, this is an identifiable credentialed expert, a professor in the Faculty of Science at Charles University in Prague, publishing (in one case, at least) in a peer-reviewed journal.  It is not an uncredentialed unidentifiable person publishing under a pseudonym on Usenet.  So the problems of general acknowledgement and acceptance of the concept and its incorporation into the corpus of human knowledge are not as clear cut in this instance as they are in other cases.  Uncle G (talk) 13:51, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

As I understand the wiki criteria, notability doesn't allow exceptions for author's credentials and indeed that would be advocating that wiki become a soapbox for established approved authors prior to getting a hearing in secondary sources. I am not advocating acceptance on those criteria, just confessing I haven't bothered to look for positive evidence. Nerdseeksblonde (talk) 14:27, 24 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Comment. At present, I cannot begin to judge the suitability of the subject, but I would observe that the citations make it appear to be one man's theory.  I'd flag this for expert attention and ask for help at the biology project.  The title does appear to be less than satisfactory, given that the hypothesis is not well known, and I also expected this to be about plastic materials. - Smerdis of Tlön (talk) 14:28, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete or merge. This single-author-sourced POV fork is a fringe theory. It may warrant inclusion in an article such as evolution, but it may even there be WP:UNDUE. Bongo  matic  15:09, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Not in evolution, that deals with mainstream science, this hypothesis is so obscure that it has not a hope of qualifying for a mention in the main article. Tim Vickers (talk) 16:17, 24 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Delete or Merge and redirect to the article on Jaroslav Flegr, the theory may not be notable, but I think the author might be. Tim Vickers (talk) 16:27, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Comment. Merge could be okay, but the article needs to be trimmed down very substantially before that can happen. (Otherwise Flagr's own notability in his article will be overwhelmed with the non-notability of frozen plasticity.)  Really, the "hypothesis" shouldn't take up more than one or two sentences outlining the basic idea, with links to further reading. It's quite clear that it's a pet theory of his own, and not one that the scientific community knows or cares about. Bueller 007 (talk) 17:19, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Agreed, this needs to be summarised for a general audience. I'd remove the section on "Microevolution and Macroevolution" entirely, as it adds very little to explaining the idea. Tim Vickers (talk) 17:21, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
 * LOL, Tim put that bio together in 1 day... Nerdseeksblonde (talk) 19:26, 24 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Delete. Any theory presented in the quack- and kook-filled Rivista di Biologia is certainly not worthy of an encyclopedia article. What next, Medical Hypotheses being treated as a reliable source? Seriously though, this got barely any attention or cites, only a book review and a magazine article as a broken link. Fences  &amp;  Windows  22:09, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Delete there is not anything worth merging. A trivial interpretation of well known processes. Not that it's wrong exactly, but that it isn't substantial. Nobody is likely to cite it (and nobody outside that journal ever has cited that Rivista paper in 10 years now), because there is almost nothing to comment on. Nobody is likely to attack it, not because its hopelessly wrong, but because there's nothing substantial enough to be worth attacking. I'm not even sure about the redirect, because this is less notable than he rest of his work. ( His parasitological work has gotten serious attention, as has his work on the mathematical construction of evolutionary trees--some of these are in good journals, and his most cited paper has over 100 cites in Scopus.) Personally, after a quick reading of the relevant papers, on a subject I think I am fairly well acquainted with, I see it simply as an example of unwarranted speculation, best characterised as "there's nothing new here".) As Uncle G says, he is not   a quack, or a fringe scientist--it's just that this work is of no importance whatsoever. It's not unknown that good scientists also publish uninteresting speculations. DGG (talk) 22:43, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
 * I did get a feeling of "so what" when reading this theory. Fences  &amp;  Windows  22:54, 24 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Comment. Someone's been adding to the article. A lot. It's a royal mess of uncited nonsense now.  Still without any indication of this theory ever being used in the scientific literature.  There's a single extremely unprofessionally written book review and that's it. Obvious self-promotion, and the "theory" is still non-notable.  The summary of the book and the theory on Jaroslav Flegr's own page is more than adequate for dealing with this "theory":"His book Frozen Evolution deals with the idea of frozen plasticity, a hypothesis that describes a new mechanism for the origin of adaptive traits. He claims that natural selection can only explain the evolution of such adaptations under very special situation, e.g. in genetically homogeneous population of asexual organisms. He describes the idea of 'frozen plasticity' as being more general, and contends that it can better explain the origin and evolution of adaptive traits in genetically heterogeneous population of sexual organisms." Bueller 007 (talk) 22:35, 29 June 2009 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.